War Resisters: ‘We Won’t Go’ to ‘We Won’t Pay’

You could hardly find a more problematic time for pacifists who do not want
their taxes spent on the military. But the recent wave of patriotic fervor
has only reinvigorated the efforts of one tiny, determined group.

“On the Friday after
Sept. 11, I was told
I should lay low for a while,” said Marian Franz, executive director of the
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “Now I have been told this is the
time. As the war grows, so does the antiwar movement.”

For more than three decades, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund has
petitioned the federal government for a way to earmark the tax revenues that
would go to the military — usually around 50 percent — for nonmilitary
purposes, like education or health care. Like conscientious objectors who in
the past were offered an alternative to military service, these resisters say
the First Amendment protects their ethical or religious objections to paying
for war with their taxes.

Like other groups that have struggled to reconcile the obligations of
citizenship with antiwar beliefs, the campaign has had a marked increase in
inquiries from the public over the last year. At the Center on Conscience and
War, a Washington-based national nonprofit group that works for the rights of
conscientious objectors, phone calls quadrupled right after
Sept. 11
and are now about 4,000 a month, double the usual number, said J. E.
McNeil, the center’s executive director.

Mary Loehr, the coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating
Committee, an organization based in Ithaca,
N.Y., that links 50
groups opposing war or weapons, has also seen a surge in interest. “Starting
Sept. 11 through this past May, we have had a call a day from
people asking for information, and our busy season is usually January through
April,” she said. “I would get 70-year-old women from the Midwest saying: ‘I
don’t want to pay for this. Will it hurt my Social Security?’”

The debate over whether it is justifiable to withhold tax money from the
military was waged on religious, philosophical and legal grounds even before
supporters managed to have a bill on the matter introduced in Congress.

Derrick Bell, a visiting professor at the New York University Law School and
an expert on constitutional issues, says the law doesn’t allow people to pick
and choose where their tax money goes, as if they were at a buffet. “When
particular groups try to exempt themselves from having their tax money
support a particular government activity, there is no legal precedent for
that,” he said.

Professor Bell said the prevailing standard was that the “free exercise” of
religion clause in the First Amendment was violated only if a law was shown
to be irrational or unreasonable, or that someone suffered some special harm
from it.

He noted, too, that even the right to be a conscientious objector to military
service was established by statute and theoretically could be overturned by
Congress. “There is nothing written in stone,” Professor Bell said. “Even the
‘free exercise’ clause has been variously interpreted.”

Opponents of the tax initiative commonly cite the fear that exempting some
taxpayers for their religious beliefs would open a floodgate of claims from
others objecting to federal support for everything from the arts to
AIDS research. Last year, for instance, a bill was introduced in the Illinois
Legislature that would allow taxpayers who are against the death penalty to
have the portion of their taxes that finances executions go to schools. The
bill, which never had any significant support, was killed.

But advocates counter that pacifism, often grounded in religious belief, is
in a category by itself.

“Whenever you come up with a new issue, you hear ‘slippery slope,’ ‘Pandora’s
box,’” said Ms. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and War, who is also a
lawyer. “There is no floodgate. A minuscule amount of taxpayer money goes to
pay for abortion or the death penalty, and other issues are political, not
religious.”

In the United States, there has been a long religious and ethical tradition
of opposition to war. During the 19th century,
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes because he opposed slavery and the
military. The Mennonites, the Quakers and the members of the Church of the
Brethren, who belong to what are known as historic peace churches because of
their pacifist tradition, all refused to take part in the American
Revolution. They laid the foundation for the creation in
1940 of the Selective Service Alternative
Service Program for conscientious objectors, which started with World War Ⅱ.

Until then, there was no legal recognition for conscientious objection.
During World War Ⅰ, 17 soldiers who were conscientious objectors even
received death sentences in a military court, although none were carried out.

In 1965 the United States Supreme Court ruled
that the criteria for conscientious objection could be broadened to include
men who were not members of any religious denomination and in
1970 to include those who did not profess belief
in a Supreme Being but had ethical or moral convictions against war.

Ms. Loehr, 44, who has been a war tax resister for 22 years, estimates that
about 5,000 people around the country currently withhold taxes because of
their objections to war and military spending.

Some tax resisters purposely keep their earnings too low to be taxed, she
said, while some are self-employed and refuse to pay estimated tax; and some
claim an abundance of tax exemptions so their employers cannot take the money
from their paychecks.

The Rev. Michael J. Baxter,
national secretary for the Catholic Peace Fellowship in South Bend,
Ind., and a professor of
theology at Notre Dame University, predicts resistance will rise. “I think as
the U.S. gets
ready to go to war in Iraq, there will be more tax resisters,” he said.
“Sometimes during war, the place that good Christians belong is in jail.”

His group has already begun advising conscientious objectors in case the
draft is revived, he said.

In June, to put a human face on their ideals, the National Campaign for a
Peace Tax Fund put together a 15-page booklet featuring the smiling images
and often sad tales of tax resisters across the country.

Some of the resisters profiled donate the taxes that they estimate would go
to the military to other causes. Others have been imprisoned or lost their
assets because of tax evasion. They say they have reached their convictions
about the immorality of war through their religious beliefs or the influence
of thinkers like the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.

As pacifists and pastors in the Church of the Brethren, Phil and Louise
Baldwin Rieman argue that contributing funds to war is the same as killing.
For 30 years they have given about 60 percent of their taxes to civil rights
and peace programs, despite Internal Revenue Service threats of liens against
their bank accounts, wage-garnishment letters sent to churches where they
worked and government seizure of their family van.

“We will look back on war someday like we did on slavery,” said Mr. Rieman,
who lives in Indianapolis. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War,
he completed two years of alternative service.

“It feels lonely sometimes, but mostly it feels frustrating,” said Mrs.
Rieman, 56, describing the couple’s long odyssey. “We can’t buy a house, we
can’t buy a car. We don’t enjoy the feeling of religious freedom they say we
enjoy in this country.”

Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity
School, said many religious traditions had a history of resistance to laws
they considered immoral, those statutes supporting slavery being prime
examples.

Even the way that the standards for conscientious objection have changed,
from requiring membership in a pacifist church to simply allowing the
adherence to certain ethics, shows a government grappling with what
constitutes religion, Professor Hauerwas said. Is it ethics, beliefs,
membership?

The Peace Tax Fund bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code, setting up a
nonmilitary fund to which pacifists could contribute the tax money that would
otherwise go to the military. Introduced in 1972
by Representative Ron Dellums, Democrat of California, it has been
reintroduced every year since and had 35 supporters in the House of
Representatives during Congress’s last session.

“Sept. 11
changed the equation once again,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel,
Democrat of New York, a two-time co-sponsor of the bill who no longer
supports it. “A case could be made that if every American decided they didn’t
like certain policies and decided to withhold taxes, it would be a problem.
It wreaks havoc with government.”

But Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the bill’s current
sponsor and a veteran of the civil rights movement, said
Sept. 11
should not make a difference in supporting the rights of conscientious
objectors. Other groups may have their own objections to the way federal
taxes are spent, he said, but his philosophy was “you try to take the ones
that have the largest meaning to the largest number of individuals.”

“We will put on a whole new effort when we come back to Congress,” said Mr.
Lewis, an ordained Baptist minister. “Look at the military budget. We have
enough bombs, we have enough missiles, we have enough guns.”

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